KickStarter BattleTech Pre-Release Thread

[Jimmious]

A lot of things sound similar-ish to Battle Brothers and I like that a lot

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

Sounds good, mostly. Now release it already, dammit. :D

 

[Grotesque]

That has to be a tranny... that voice, that labored breathing into the microphone.

you're so mean!

 

[toro]

That has to be a tranny... that voice, that labored breathing into the microphone.

you're so mean!

I would say it's quite grotesque.

 

[Burning Bridges]

This shit is still not released?

 

[Cael]

Wait, what? They are putting it in Concordant worlds? What the hell? That means your two closest Great House neighbours are the MadCaps and the (at the time) Goody Two Shoes McDavions, and the leader of the Concordant has this psycho conspiracist SJW-esque hate for the McDs. That sounds like a recipe for a death and glory dive by your expendable merc unit into a Davion world financed by the MadCaps via the psycho...

EDIT:

Spoiler

PS. I hope they FIX the damned loophole in the storyline post-3028: Candance Liao goes to New Avalon TO NEGOTIATE A STOP TO HOSTILITIES AND GET DAVION TO AGREE TO A MARSHALL PLAN. She then goes back to Sian, depose her father (who has had a complete breakdown by then), rule in his stead, marry Justin (who is never revealed to be a Davion agent) and get rid of Romano and her mad line.
Give up the throne of the whole Confed for just St Ives, my ass! If she was as ruthless and power hungry as portrayed in Wolf's Dragoons, she'd never do that. If she cared for the people as portrayed in the Warrior's Trilogy, she would never leave the people in the hands of Romano.
Damned Stackpole dropped the ball there.

 

[Country_Gravy]

I have had a Battletech boner since the demo came out. I try not to play it much, but it's tough.

I think I saw an ad yesterday that said if I had a Battletech boner that lasted longer than four hours I should seek medical attention, but I don't care.

 

[Cael]

I have had a Battletech boner since the demo came out. I try not to play it much, but it's tough.

I think I saw an ad yesterday that said if I had a Battletech boner that lasted longer than four hours I should seek medical attention, but I don't care.

If it starts to hurt, cut it off. Less pain in the long run

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I'll eat my proverbial hat if Helm Memory Core, Myndo Waterly, and foreshadowing of Operation Scorpion don't make an appearance.

 

[Cael]

Kind of difficult. If we are looking at it being set in the TC, then you are at the opposite end of the Inner Sphere from where all the mentioned action is.

 

[Grotesque]

Last night I attended the meetup with Jordan Weissman in London and as some forum members have expressed an interest in hearing what went on, (hi @Prussian Havoc!) I thought I'd get down some of the questions that Jordan answered last night.

The event itself was fairly small (just over a dozen fans I think) and Jordan happily answered a variety of questions to the best of his ability. If you ever do get the chance to meet Jordan in person, go for it, his enthusiasm for Battletech and gaming in general is only matched by his patience for answering the same questions again and again

Disclaimer: Jordan was happy to answer a lot of questions but didn't necessarily know specifics in all areas. Also balancing and tweaking in lots of areas will be continuing until release, so some of these answers won't be reflected in the state of the final game at release. I'll group his answers to various questions into (hopefully) sensible areas. I'll be doing a lot of paraphrasing to amalgamate various responses into a sensible block of info - this wasn't an interview and none of this is a direct quote.

What's happening with visual range? Is the setting in the 2nd Beta the one we're getting at release?

With the 2nd beta we were testing how a smaller visual range worked for people. In our current build (and probably the release build) the range is being increased, but not by a huge amount. Of the top of my head I think it's around 300m base, with the Pilot's tactics skill extending it out further.

We don't want to extend the visual range too far, as we've found that cuts down on the close in manoeuvres need to make to get flank shots on exposed sides etc. Even now we're not limited by the size of people's tables we still don't want Mechs you can barely see shooting each other from huge distances - it just doesn't feel as fun.

In the last dev Q&A, Kiva mentioned that there had been several balance changes to weapons/skills etc. and that things were quite different from our Beta Release. When the general multiplayer release happens will there also be a balance update?

We'd like that, but our build and the beta build are now so different that porting the changes would take man hours that we just don't have. In general, the issues we've hit with multiplayer have pushed us back a lot more than we'd like and it's pretty much all hands on deck to get this game out as soon as we can.

EDIT - Mitch has added clarification on delays and game development here:

https://community.battletechgame.com/forums/thread...

How are the maps coming? Any cool biomes you can talk about?

I think we've got 7 different biomes, including a desert one (heat penalties) and a frozen/icy one (go nuts with the hot stuff). We've also got a cool Lunar/no atmosphere one and everyone thinks that will be cold, but in a vacuum your mechs really suck at staying cool so that will be a fun one for you I'm sure. One thing we had to do with that - we did consider how fatal it would be for your pilots if a cockpit got cracked. We realised very soon that your pilots are fragile enough without a clip to the cockpit killing them so things are not more lethal than usual on those maps.

How's the campaign coming? Have you finished it?

I've not finished it myself, but I have played it a lot. I don't want to talk about the story too much but I can say:

• Character creation has a 'Traveller' vibe to it, answering questions to say what noble house you came from, why you left and what you were doing before the campaign starts. You can't die during character creation though!
• Mechwarriors you can hire in the game have gone through a similar (but more detailed) creation process, giving them tags that interact with the Event system
• The event system is really, really cool and we're still creating more events for it. It's how we'll be able to tell a wider story about what's going on in the universe whilst you're creating your own story.
• Whilst the Princess helps you get to the Argo and is a big potential client for you, if you just want to jump off around the Periphery and ignore the 'main' story missions, that's fine. The Princess will fail without your help, but your story continues.
• The only lose condition for the campaign is running out of money. We're still trying to balance things so that you never really feel completely comfortable with your cashflow.
• When negotiating contracts you have these sliders where you can ask for more or less salvage, money and reputation with the client. Sometimes you'll want to take a hit on money and salvage to build a rep with a faction to give you preferential treatment in the future, or because you pissed them off by making a 'bad faith' extraction.
• If a mission goes south you can withdraw. If you've accomplished at least some of the objectives then that's considered a 'good faith' withdrawal and there's less of a reputation hit for you.
• Some missions will have optional secondary objectives/targets of opportunity. Completing those can often bring you rewards but sometimes cost you reputation with some factions.
• The first tutorial mission has you in one mech. As you run through the opening story missions you'll quickly get a few more before you find the Argo. I can't remember if the 'starting lance' in the beta files is the one you'll get in the release game.
• If you complete the Aurigan Restoration story that's not the end of your story. You can keep on taking contracts as long as you have the money. Hopefully if we add content to the game later (meaning here I think more mechs, events and missions), that will just drop in to that campaign for you.
• Stomping on vehicles with Mechs looks great.
• Using the mech lab to modify your mechs takes time and money. For example, your Panther got its PPC blown off and you only have a Large laser in stock? Your techs can fit that but it might take too long for you to have that ready for your next mission. You might have to make some hard roster choices here and there.

Things you wanted in the game but couldn't do for time/money reasons? In success...
I really wanted you to be able to send different lances out on different contracts at the same time, have more complicated multistage missions etc. but that dropped out of scope. Also infantry in some form would have been great, oh and flamers being able to set things on fire. Let's get this game out first and then we can think about what comes next.

How do you see future content for the game happening? You have that partnership with Paradox...

I really don't know at the moment. Some sort of mix of free content and paid DLC seems reasonable but we haven't nailed down any specifics yet. Let's get the game release first! I do really, really want a Hatchetman in the game though.

Can you use the Mechlab in multiplayer?

We're going to have an option for the host to enforce stock mechs or allow customisation.

What can you say about the legal stuff going on at the moment?

Nothing except that our lawyers are working on it and that it won't affect the release date of the game.

 

[Infinitron]

Looks like a big day for BattleTech: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/webeharebrained/battletech/posts/2044957

A First Look at the Campaign and a Production Update!

Hey everyone, Mitch here!

Last week we did a press tour with our friends at Paradox to spread the word about BATTLETECH. Mike and I flew to San Francisco to meet with journalists there, while Jordan did the same in London. We gave the editors some hands-on time with one of the first story missions in the game and walked them through the full scope of the single-player campaign. We're looking forward to seeing what the press have to say this week, and hope to get people excited for our release next year.

Here’s a few we found just now!

• PC Gamer
• IGN
• PCGamesN

Anyway - for all the new screenshots, head on over to this forum post!




And here's a full playthrough of the early story mission we showed:



While we were in San Francisco and London visiting the press, we also got a chance to hang out with some awesome BattleTech fans and a good time was definitely had by all.

Just a smattering of the great folk who showed up.

Another smattering of the UK crowd.


It was an exciting, whirlwind tour but we're definitely glad to be back in the studio, working on the game. Speaking of which, how about a production update?

Production Update
Things are rolling around here! We have the entire singleplayer campaign and mercenary simulation fully assembled and now we’re working through the game chapter-by-chapter, screen-by-screen, feature-by-feature to get everything to a shippable level.

Most mornings, Mike (Game Director) leads playtests/critiques of BATTLETECH in our break room. He holds them in our break room so everyone on the team feels comfortable wandering in and hearing what’s being said. He and Kiva (Lead Designer) determine what they’re going to look at ahead of time and invite the people responsible for that section of the game to play together and collaborate on a plan for improving things. This visibility is key to improvement. When you’re in the thick of making a game, it can be challenging to step back and play it from an audience member’s point of view.

The whole team is methodically working through every part of the game to “up-level” it - missions are getting second and third drafts, designer-created maps are going through full art passes, temporary voice-overs are being replaced with professional actors in missions and cinematics, quiet missions are suddenly filled with dramatic music, and programmer-created interfaces are getting the full art and audio treatment.




It’s a ton of intense work and the whole team meets briefly for announcements and general direction every day before breaking up into small groups for tight communication and progress updates. After that, it’s heads-down for the rest of the day. We try to keep meetings to a minimum and if we have to have one, we do our best to keep it tight and action-oriented.

In addition to all of this, a few members of the team have been diligently progressing on our multiplayer network infrastructure, analyzing data and updating the Double-Secret Multiplayer Beta with important changes. Expect a separate update on that soon.

There’s still a lot of work to do (including tons of balance work) but we can see the next milepost up ahead - the plan is to be feature and content complete by the end of the year, so we can go into full-on bug fixing and polish mode after a much needed break. As Jordan noted in our mid-August update, all indications are that Paradox & HBS will release BATTLETECH in early 2018.

Thanks for sticking with us as we develop our most challenging, complex, and aspirational game to-date. It’s a big one and we truly appreciate all your support.

-- Mitch

Jordan, Mike, Mitch and the rest of the gang are heading to Vancouver on December 9th to attend Mech_Con, a HUGE gathering of BattleTech fans and developers. We had an absolute blast last year and we encourage you to come and hang out with us. Here’s a video to give you a taste of what you can expect.

More ways to stay up to date!
You can catch up with our latest Dev Q&A from October as well as all the previous Q&A’s on our Youtube page. Note that information may be outdated the farther back you go.

Find tons of awesome BattleTech fans on the BATTLETECH Forum.

This Twitter thread by Lead Designer @HBS_thratchen shows the process of building a Battletech map.

And our music composer Jon Everist created a YouTube series on the creation of the game's music, which he also sometimes tweets about @JonEverist.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.pcgamer.com/if-you-lose-battletechs-main-storyline-the-game-doesnt-end/

Half the battle in BattleTech is paying the bills
Our first hands-on with BattleTech's singleplayer campaign reveals a unique internal structure.

If all of your pilots die in BattleTech, you don't lose. It's a big setback for your mercenary company, but hey, there's always more procedurally-generated mechwarriors willing to jump into the cockpit for cash.

If all of your mechs die in BattleTech, you also don't lose. It's a massive setback, or as game director Mike McCain tells me, "Losing an entire mech is an order of magnitude worse than losing a mechwarrior." Still, even if all your hardware gets blown up by lasers you can still take out a loan, buy some more mechs, and try to grind a few missions to pay off your debt. "People are easier to replace than the mechs, as horrible as that sounds," says McCain.

BattleTech's only loss condition is bankruptcy. As the leader of a mercenary outfit, your focus in the singleplayer campaign is on helping an ousted leader, Lady Kamea Arano, to liberate her people. But as you're lining up long-range missile shots against Arano's enemies, you'll also have to consider the economics of running a freelance team of pilots, mechanics, and medics and keeping your mechs, equipment, and ship in shape.

Inside your spaceship, the Argo, there's a room past the MechBay, navigation console, and other stations where you can examine your budget. Here, everything gets tallied up: the cost of ship upgrades, mech upkeep, and pay for your pilots, doctors, and mech technicians. It's not a granular, sim-like Excel sheet or anything—for example, you set a single, shared pay rate for all your pilots, rather than typing out salaries for each character.

But unlike other games in the genre, like XCOM 2, nearly everything in BattleTech costs credits. Repairing your mechs. Moving your ship on the galactic map. Even using a hyperjump costs extra, like passing through a cosmic tollbooth. Worrying about your bottom line might encourage you to build mechs that don't expend lots of ammo, because every missile or autocannon round you fire in BattleTech costs money to replace. If you're low on funds or underpaying your MechWarriors, you'll also encounter a set of special events on the Argo.

You'll also have to weigh pay against salvage and your reputation with the factions you take missions from. In a 'negotiation' phase before each mission, you have a chance to set how many credits and how much salvage you'd like to earn. Demand less salvage and less pay, and you'll earn more reputation, a resource that will ultimately drive factions to trust you with harder jobs, or offer discounts at stores on planets they control.

Staying in the black
Although economic judgments are woven into BattleTech, managing your finances isn't meant to be punishing. "We don't intend this kind of financial failure to be constantly looming over your Mercenary career at every step," explains McCain. "The game is about growing your mercenary company, and helping the Restoration to liberate her people. Financial ruin should lurk in the distance—and incentivize players to improve their management efforts if it catches up to them—but the game isn't designed to be a constant battle for financial solvency."

As McCain says, you'll be warned well in advance if you're running low on credits. "We want to provide plenty of opportunities for the player to recover—whether by firing some MechWarriors, paying your crew less, selling off extra Mechs and gear, taking out a loan, or taking more challenging and lucrative contracts," he says.

What's interesting to me about the way BattleTech treats money is the way it influences the game's structure. Because bankruptcy is the only way your mercenary career can end, you can actually fail the main questline of the campaign and still continue playing, taking missions from other factions.

That main questline has you fighting on behalf of Lady Arano, leader of the Arano Restoration. She's been driven out of power by an authoritarian group known as The Directorate, led by her uncle. You'll probably want to help her out—not only will you miss out on the game's biggest story beats, but the Restoration pays really well, Harebrained Schemes tells me. If you do choose to ignore these "Restoration Missions," you'll see more and more planets swallowed up by the Directorate on BattleTech's galactic map. "If the story campaign is lost, the Restoration is extinguished and all Directorate-controlled planets become travel-able—and the Directorate becomes a possible client for mercenary missions in the game," says McCain.

In short: if you let the bad guys win, you can start working for them. Don't expect a bespoke 'Directorate campaign' to spring out of the ground if this happens, but it's still neat and unexpected that BattleTech's campaign structure is this malleable. "It's a significantly a bigger game than our Shadowrun games," says McCain, and then studio co-founder Mitch Gitelman, laughing, takes it a step further: "'Significantly' is an understated word. This is the biggest, most complex game we've ever made as a studio."

Harebrained Schemes isn't comfortable estimating how long a campaign will take to complete for an average player, from the hour I spent with it, BattleTech reads as a strategy RPG that you'll be able to grind pretty freely, taking procedurally-generated assassination, escort, base defense, base attack, or capture missions from the other factions that populate the map.

And while mod tools are off the table for the studio, that doesn't mean that BattleTech won't have any mods at all. "We are not offering mod support. We are also doing nothing to prevent it," says McCain.

I need to spend a full day or two with it to see how BattleTech's systems fit together, but my hope is that they congeal into something less like XCOM with robots, and more like a dynamic tabletop campaign made digital.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/battletech/battletech-single-player-campaign

BattleTech's campaign is a fine blend of XCOM and Cowboy Bebop

As the captain of a ship filled with mercenary mech pilots, your main concern is keeping your ship flying. While that is obvious the means of doing so do not come so easy. It means making enough money each month to pay your crew and afford the fuel you need to travel between jobs. Everything else is secondary. In that respect, there is a touch of Cowboy Bebop - yes, the anime - about Harebrained Schemes’s BattleTech.

Earning money in BattleTech is simple - at least, in theory. The turn-based mech game takes place in a universe busy with warring royal families, competing corporations, and downtrodden people waiting for their moment of revolution. All of these groups are looking for the help of a lance of MechWarriors who command the walking battle tanks. Easy money! Right? Well, maybe not, as completing a job with a net profit is the challenge here.

The mission I played of BattleTech’s single-player campaign had me hired by a corporation that needed help taking back control of mining platforms stolen by a competitor. I had to destroy a command tower that was operating an array of turrets across the map and take out the lead mech defending the area. Simple.

I ordered my lance of four mechs to split up, directing two to take the main road up to the base housing the turret control tower, while the other two would flank round and attack the same base in an assault over the desert. Within two turns it was all falling apart. The mechs I had sent along the main road got caught up in a close-range fight against a pair of 50-tonne mechs armed with an array of lasers and high calibre machine guns and, now in sight of the enemy, became targets for every long-range missile turret on the map. The mechs I had head through the desert did so unmolested, but the route was slow-going, and they were not going to be any help until they could get into range in another few turns.

After taking lots of damage, the mechs on the main road were able to take out one of the defenders and march into the base to destroy turret command, halting the rain of missiles that had chipped away at their armour. In a last-ditch effort to take out the second defending mech, I had one of my own perform a Death From Above - activating its jump jets and pouncing on the final defender. The tactic worked, sort of. The weight of the 55-tonne mech destroyed the already weakened defender but took with it the leg of my mech, causing it to fall over - the pilot was knocked out cold in the process, taking my mech out of the battle.

Over the next hour, my three remaining pilots were able to take the second base, destroying the main defending mech and completing my objectives. However, in doing so, my mechs were severely beaten up, losing armour plating, limbs, and the pilots themselves sustained injuries.

While technically a win, in the grand scheme of the campaign I had played terribly. I had four injured pilots, all who needed time to heal; four mechs that need to be repaired and refitted, which is costly and time-consuming; and, because I had hammered the enemy mechs instead of taking each out with precise assaults, I had destroyed a lot of the potential salvage from the battle. While I get cash and battle salvage for completing the mission, the rewards are eaten into by the costs - and mine were devastating. Depending on whether I had the parts to repair the damaged mechs, and if the work can be completed by the time I reach my next contract, I could actually be in a worse position for my next mission despite my success.

Harebrained Schemes have devised a clever campaign for BattleTech that is part scripted and part procedurally generated. The central story is offered to you as a breadcrumb trail of contracts, all focused on helping a deposed princess take back her throne, but surrounding this type of scripted event are missions that are spawned out of your circumstances. If you help Corporation A against their rival Corporation B, then Corporation A may start offering you better and better paying contracts against Corporation B.

This balance of crafted and generated missions should colour the galaxy you are travelling across, letting your redraw it with the knowledge of personal alliances and rivalries you have formed, and the stories you have uncovered by chance.

Across these missions, your pilots will level up, unlock new abilities, and increase their skills in the cockpit - either becoming masters of a single style of machine, or spreading their experience across multiple builds. Similarly, you will salvage a collection of mech chassis and fittings from the battlefield. In BattleTech, salvage is more important than what you can buy on the open market because you aren’t living in the golden age of humanity; the engineers of your time are not as talented as the mechbuilders that came before them. This mean you can only salvage the best mechs and equipment in the game by first defeating them on the battlefield (so long as you do not damage it too badly).

I can already see how these different systems of continuity - your bank balance, your pilots, and your mechs - will bind together to make you invested in the BattleTech campaigns. Often, there will be missions where I have to choose between the life of an experienced mech pilot or the success of a mission, or holding back from a fatal shot because it could potentially destroy some invaluable salvage.

If Harebrained can pull it off, it looks like they will infuse every turn of every battle in BattleTech with contextual meaning stemming from a procedurally generating campaign. If that is the case, whenever you make planetfall and send your mechs into a turn-based battle, you will have to keep in mind larger concerns than simply achieving victory. There may genuinely be times when you are richer for retreating than paying the cost of what it will take to win.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

The game footage got me a bit of a nostalgic feeling for the old FMV pilot feeds from MechCommander. Sure they were rather cheesy and 90's vidya budget production, but they were a fun little detail.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

That mission that they showcased on Youtube has completely pointless "return to starting position" portion.

edit.

Spoiler

I should have watched whole video before commenting :selfhate:

VA is kinda annoying (hope that menu offers option to set order confirmations to happen less frequently) and music is boring, self repeating mediocrity.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/11/15/battletechs-campaign-mode-is-a-robot-dark-ages/

Battletech’s campaign mode is a robot Dark Ages

It’s odd to think of Mickey Mouse while ordering a giant robot to rip another robot’s arms off, but in the words of its creator Jordan Weisman, Battletech is kind of like Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland. Opened in 1955, the park was an homage to the march of science that inevitably struggled to keep up. Its present-day incarnations are a bizarre mishmash of the vintage, the cutting edge and the merely obsolete, Flash Gordon-brand retro colliding with touchscreens and VR. Similarly, Battletech is a vision of human history up to the 31st century that began life as a table-top strategy game in 1984, made up of once-outlandish concepts such as artificial muscles that now seem positively quaint.

The series wears its age more gracefully than Tomorrowland, however, because its campaign is as much about obsolescence and forgetfulness as the far future – a re-imagining of the fall of the Roman Empire and ensuing “dark age” that rebuts the concept of history as a steady, linear advance. It’s a solid footing for a strategy sim in the vein of Total War, comparable to Warhammer 40K’s Imperium but less, well, preposterous, though I still think the turn-based battle system Adam sampled in June is Battletech’s strongest asset.

The base campaign starts you off as captain of a mercenary mech outfit in a galactic backwater, tasked with paying off a bank loan so that you can venture out into more lucrative regions of space and enmesh yourself in the squabbles of various ancient noble houses. The game is set in 3025, following the collapse of the illustrious Star League and three bloody wars of succession, with much of the older tech in operation now beyond the science of the day.

This premise lends a certain workmanlike charm to an otherwise unsurprising core loop of travelling to planets, taking on missions and overhauling your ship, crew and mechs. If you want to warp to another star system, for instance, you’ll need to factor in how long it’ll take your battered Leopard-class starter vessel to chug to a jumpship. Your funds will continue to deplete in the process, so it’s possible you might reach the destination without the means to pay your mech pilots or take on vital replacement crew. In battle, meanwhile, you’ll find that salvage is often worth more than cold hard cash. If you spot a mech with a rare League-era arm cannon, for example, you’ll probably want to keep that arm in one piece by firing on the target from the other side.

Battletech’s mix of rickety, venerable gizmos and a sprawling cosmic theatre naturally owes a lot to the original Star Wars. “I was a teenager when that came out, and the first couple of moments are just completely mind-blowing, oh my god what’s going on, walking robots and giant spaceships!” Weisman recalls. “And then you’re in a kitchen, and you’re like, oh I know that. I’ve been in that scene, with my parents. You have to create that foundation, you have to create something people can relate to and then bring in the exotic from there.”

If grounding flights of fancy is a familiar sci-fi concern, Battletech’s theme of regression also draws on Weisman’s time with the real-life navy. “During my limited college career in the United States Marine Academy studying to be an officer on commercial ships, one of the things I learned was that we can’t produce a ship’s hull with the level of friction that we had in World War 2. The welding techniques that produce low-friction hulls have been lost. They were making so many ships that they had to develop these techniques, and then we didn’t make ships for a long time, and those people all retired. So even in amongst constant evolution, we lose things, we lose knowledge.”

Time and cash aside, Battletech’s broad overarching campaign dynamics are morale, which is tracked by individual ship crew member or mech pilot, and faction reputation. In addition to four preset base traits (loosely – ranged accuracy, mobility, resilience and perception), pilots unlock valuable battlefield skills with experience, so keeping veterans happy by bumping up their wages is important, though in the event of a departure you can always find fresh meat at hiring halls on each planet. Pilots also come with origin stories that affect the proceedings in little and large ways. Employ the scion of a noble family, for example, and you can put his or her contacts to use when soliciting new missions.

Faction rep, meanwhile, broadly determines the quality of mission you’ll be offered and the size of your payout. There’s a haggling system that lets you adjust the ratio of cash to salvage to reputation gains per sortie: if you’re desperate for one particular group’s affection, you can even offer to work for free. Lest all this seem too much a question of fiddling with sliders, there are also semi-random multiple-choice story events that may affect crew morale and reputation. One example I’m shown involves stopping two underlings killing each other over the last cup of coffee. You can divide it up between them, tell them you’ve got bigger things to worry about, or down the cup yourself in a fit of alpha-dog posturing. A minor incident, for sure, but one that may haunt you on the eve of a major battle when your ace mechwarrior ups and quits.

When not soothing egos and balancing the books, you’re going to spend most of your time outside combat tinkering with your mechs – each a gorgeous blend of World War clunk and the sleek proportions of a Macross figurine, comprising a maximum weight allowance and a number of hardpoint slots per limb. There’s scope for quite the range of builds, from insectile, evasive flankers armed with artillery pods and jump jets, to broad-shouldered heavies who are designed to push through concentrated turret fire without losing their footing. You’ll need to allow plenty of time to carry out these overhauls before undertaking a mission, however: nothing screams “amateur” like accepting a tough gig only to find that your star robot is still having its legs reattached.

The most intriguing flourishes in construction are stability and heat management, each of which keys into the wider pressure to salvage choice parts. Most energy weapons inflict barely any knockback, but will overheat the victim faster, ultimately forcing a shutdown and rendering it susceptible to surgical limb shots. Projectile weapons will bowl mechs over much faster, again allowing you to shoot at individual components, but dish out much less heat. Which tactic you favour will vary according to the planetary biome underfoot: when defending a base on a waterworld there’s less need to worry about the temperature, but if you’re escorting somebody through a desert you might want to detach launchers that generate lots of heat when fired.

There’s a main story arc buried in amongst the game’s dozens of star systems, involving the restoration of a usurped princess (a tale told via lustrous 2D art with animate touches). It’s one of many, many stories Weisman and Hairbrained Games might unearth from or weave into Battletech’s 30 years of world-building, whether in the form of updates or, touch wood, sequels. Weisman is enthused by the prospect of a Battletech equivalent for Paradox’s legendary feud ’em up, Crusader Kings. “I do think there’s a very interesting game to make there,” he says. “I wrote a version of Battletech for tabletop called The Succession War that was at that kind of global, geopolitical level. That would be a classic Paradox gambit, to do Battletech at that scale.” In the shorter term, there’s the possibility of an expansion themed around the return of the Clans, Battletech’s equivalent for the barbarian hordes who brought down Rome.

If, like me, you’re mostly familiar with the Battletech universe care of the MechWarrior spin-off games, you may be shocked by the sheer amount of ground there is to cover. This is a vast and engagingly ramshackle fiction, encompassing over a hundred spin-off novels and dozens of tabletop and computer games, all of it funnelled into the mournful spectacle of massive, ancient, rickety robots laying each other out for the count. I’m not sure the new game’s campaign options can match the volatility and variety of XCOM or the later Total Wars, but the battling continues to be excellent, and while I’ve picked over the spoils of imploding empires in many games, this is among the few that really explores the premise at the level of systems and tactics. Tomorrow can wait.

Battletech is due for release in 2018.

 

[udm]

I was mildly triggered by the projectiles/lasers passing through the hill to hit the enemy mech.

 

[Grotesque]

That shitty white UI color scheme is final and the player will not be able to change it.

 

[Alienman]

I was mildly triggered by the projectiles/lasers passing through the hill to hit the enemy mech.

It's nuXcom all over again...

 

[Infinitron]

More previews: http://www.gamebanshee.com/news/119972-battletech-previews.html

VentureBeat:

As fun as it is to use your mech’s jump ability to stomp on a tank (and it is fun), part of the concept of mechs in this setting is that they can take, and deal, a tremendous amount of damage. This means that unlike XCOM, your units will be able to take several enemy hits without being killed forever. And the sheer amount of damage a mech can sustain also means time and money spent on repairs, causing more management decisions to be made..

In other words, Battletech’s universe offers more possibilities between total success and total failure. Every battle is likely to include major mech damage; getting a perfect run doesn’t fit the setting. And that means more time, and strategic decision-making, spent on making sure things work well enough to succeed more than you fail, instead of depending on perfect runs.​

The Sixth Axis:

One recently added aspect is in a morale system, where your team dishing out damage boosts the morale of your Mech Warriors and lets you spend this on an Offensive Push or Defensive Push ability, the former letting you take a target of opportunity attack, even if the enemy isn’t knocked prone.

Win or lose, you head back up to your ship to lick your wounds and prepare for the next mission you take on. Mechs will need to be repaired in the Mech Bay which can take time, but this is also where you can customise mechs using parts salvaged on the battlefield, swapping out different weapons to change a mech’s role from close range fire spewing brawler to a long range sniper. There’s a lot of depth here, if you want to find it. Similarly, if your pilots were injured, they’ll need to recuperate before you can send them into battle again, especially if you’d rather they didn’t perish on the battlefield and lose all the experience and skills that you’ve unlocked for them.​

And then there is GameWatcher:

I took things more cautiously with Alpha. They didn’t have turret support anymore but they did have a Shadowhawk Mech and a load of tanks, and my poor Kintaro was on his last legs. I carefully stationed my team like hawks on the edge of the cliff overlooking the base and rained fire down on the protecting force. To very little effect unfortunately, other than getting their attention. I realized I would have to get closer. I kept a couple of the hillside while I moved the others in for the kill. I even managed to rocket jump-execute a few tanks on the way, which was incredibly satisfying. I even managed to do that to the Shadowhawk but it didn’t quite finish him – but the next volley of rockets did. Hooray!

I headed back to the extraction point for a well-earned payday, but this wouldn’t be Firefly without a sudden but inevitable betrayal. Yes, my employers decided that now they had control of both mines, and my Mechs were hurting a little, they thought they could get away with not paying me. And killing me, of course. They thought wrong. They made the same mistake Majesty Metals did – keeping the controls to their Turrets in a single highly blow-up-able building. With that building blown up and the Turrets deactivated, it just took a few jump-splat-executes to destroy all the paltry tanks they’d sent my way. Now, about that payday…​

​

 

[Jason Liang]

I thought that was Glory at first glance.

Looks a little like Star Trek Discovery, triggered.

I'll eat my proverbial hat if Helm Memory Core, Myndo Waterly, and foreshadowing of Operation Scorpion don't make an appearance.

Warrior: En Garde takes place in 3026. The Comstar Primus is still Julian Tiepolo.

Ok, I'm tumesced too. The game taking place RIGHT BEFORE En Garde is so sexy. Wolf's Dragoons is in the middle of their Kurita contract; still a few years before Misery.

 

[Cael]

I hope they don't make it rogue-like in that they put in so many random variables in the morale and happiness system that an unlucky roll is a near certainty and you lose valuable 'Mechwarriors that way.

While it may seem realistic, there are good reasons why turned based games tend to shy away from morale and happiness randomness. Now, if it were a fixed variable (i.e., you do this, this WILL happen, not this + random roll will happen), that is a different story. Turn-based thrive on better predictability as to what your actions in the turn will result in.

 

[Country_Gravy]

I'm ready

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/webeharebrained/battletech/posts/2056597

Official Multiplayer Backer Beta Is LIVE!

After weeks of gathering data from our Double-Secret Multiplayer Beta and more weeks of revising our network architecture to allow the Global BattleTech Community to easily play together, we are happy (and relieved) to announce that the Official Multiplayer Backer Beta Is LIVE on Steam. We hope you enjoy your multiplayer matches as much as we enjoy ours.

If you are at the MECHWARRIOR Backer level or above and have already downloaded the game, Steam will automatically update the Beta to include the multiplayer mode. No password is needed and no action is required to start playing against others right away.

We’d like to extend a HUGE THANK YOU to the brave Double-Secret Multiplayer Beta testers who provided invaluable data and feedback during this early testing period. Your support has benefitted your fellow Backers, our community, and all the folks who are about to find out how cool the BattleTech universe is.

This final beta release is intended to test our multiplayer code with a larger sample of players around the world. You won't find any new combat features, very many balance changes (beyond those we've already done), or additional content in the update, much as we would love it. It was simply too much for our small team to keep the Beta and Production versions of the game in synch for months - or to attempt to update the Beta now after months of adding new code and content.

The Skirmish & Multiplayer Backer Beta will remain open through the end of the year. After that, the Beta will be shut down in preparation for the upcoming launch of the full game. Folks can still purchase Beta Access (and Backers can still upgrade their reward level) until Friday, December 1st.

If you’re looking for a match, head over to the Beta matchmaking sub-forum to find other MechCommanders ready for some Heavy Metal Mayhem! And if you’re eligible for the beta and haven’t downloaded it yet, this is your last call - head over to the Backer Beta PDF Manual to get instructions for getting your Steam Key from your BackerKit account, downloading the game, and how to play the game.

Have fun! Melt cockpits!

--HBS

P.S. Oh, and if you missed our last update, check out all the new campaign screenshots we shared!

 

[Black]

Remember to curb your enthusiasm.
https://twitter.com/HBS_thratchen

This thing is the design lead on a Battletech game, you know, the franchise about non-stop conflict, wars, battles, with tens of tons of warmachines. This creature doesn't have enough T to touch the faggy jap ninja mechs, let alone Battletech.
Battletech and Mechwarrior lucked out in a way. It died, was forgotten and swept under the rug before "progressives" started destroying anything they could latch their parasitic tentacles to.
Until now.